Wolfram Mathematica

Wolfram Mathematica, usually called Mathematica, is a technical computing system developed by Wolfram Research of Champaign, Illinois, and conceived by Stephen Wolfram. It bundles libraries for symbolic computation, statistics, machine learning, data manipulation, network and time series analysis, optimization and plotting, and lets users build interfaces and link to programs written in other languages. Version 1.0 appeared on June 23, 1988. The system is split into a kernel, which interprets expressions written in the Wolfram Language and returns result expressions, and a front end built around notebook documents that mix code, text and graphics; the original front end was designed by Theodore Gray. Later releases added packed arrays, sparse matrices, automatic multi-threading and GPU support through CUDA and OpenCL, plus links to C, Java and .NET and to the Wolfram Alpha answer engine. The Wolfram Language it runs is described as fundamentally based on Lisp. Mathematica is closed source, a choice Wolfram Research ties to its business model, and critics have faulted it for that.